My Windows 7 laptop (inherited from my late spouse) was showing its age and so I got a new computer. By which I mean I consulted with a friend with some skills, we cannibalized the old desktop for usable components, purchased new components, and made Frakenputer. Rumors of us yelling “It’s alive! IT’S ALIVE!” after we first fired it up are greatly exaggerated. I purchased a new copy of Windows 10 for Frank and installed it rather than trying to screw around with updating the Windows 7 laptop or trying to find the ownership key for the copy of windows which was probably lost years ago.
Bear with me, there’s a bit more background.
I used to cruise the internet on W7, but with it aging and updates for Windows 7 going away at some point I plan to disconnect the WiFi and simply never let it roam the internet again. I will still keep it and use it for as long as it continues to last, but strictly as a local in-house machine.
I am going to use Frank as my internet computer going forward. I have been surprisingly pleased with how it’s working and with the updates for Windows 10. Frank has the computer protection that came with Windows, but not anything else at this point in time.
During the years W7 was cruising the internet we relied on software called System Mechanic to keep it all tidy and disease-free (along with a few other things, like religiously updating and patching) and had good results. I’m coming up on having to re-up System Mechanic soon, so I have some decisions to make.
I will be asking System Mechanic about some of this, but they are aggressive with the sales tactics and I don’t entirely trust them.
At this point, would it still be safe to continue using Windows 7 with System Mechanic?
Does Windows 10 need System Mechanic (or equivalent) or would it be a good idea to have it or something similar?
In my opinion no, these type of applications are no longer needed. This doesn’t mean you won’t want to eventually do a re-installation of Windows 10 to freshen things up but Windows 10 is better at managing the registry creep which older versions of Windows had.
So… you don’t feel System Mechanic is needed for a Windows 10 machine?
I’m not upgrading my laptop - for one thing, it’s over 12 years old, upgrading is not practical. It’s still useful for storage and applications that don’t require the latest software, but I don’t want to even attempt upgrading the OS. I’ll just keep it off the internet.
Yes. System Mechanic, CCleaner, and similar programs were used to find and remove leftover unused entries in the registry to improve performance. In XP, Vista, and 7 the registry continued to grow larger & larger until it eventually bogged the system down and so these programs were effective.
Try running those same programs on Windows 8 or Windows 10 and you’ll see little benefit as those operating systems are better at limiting registry growth. In 5 years or so I still suggest doing a fresh install of your operating system but not for the same reasons which those maintenance programs try to address.
If you run Tron, carefully following the directions, it will harmlessly remove all kinds of garbage from your computer. It is up to date and knows about Windows 10.
For the air-gapped (not networked) Win7 machine, make a system restore point that you could restore to later if you happen to mess something up. Verify that it’s at the latest patch revision of 2/2020, since there are some non-security functional updates, that will let you keep using it as long as possible offline.
